Shrewsbury Cakes
Ingredients
- 8 oz Flour
- 2 oz Fine Sugar
- 1/2 tsp Cinnamon
- 10 tbsp Cold Butter
- 1/2 tsp Rose Water
- 1/2 tsp Water
- 4 tbsp Caster Sugar or other fine sugar For sprinkling on top after baking
Instructions
- Set oven temperature to 338 °F.
- Mix the dry ingredients using a fork or whisk.
- Cut butter into 1tbl chunks. Then, using your hands, rub the cold butter into the dry ingredients, then work in the rose water.
- Knead for 10 minutes until it forms a smooth dough.
- Gather the dough into a ball. I cut the ball it in half to make it a little easier to roll out, but you can also do it all at once if you prefer.
- Roll dough out to 1/4 inch thick on a floured surface. I found that placing a piece of plastic wrap over the dough makes it much easier to roll. The dough doesn't come apart with plastic wrap over the top. Cut dough into 3 to 4 inch rounds and then place them on a baking sheet.
- Bake for 15 minutes, until they are just starting to change color but not browned. These are a pale cake/cookie!
- Remove from the oven and sprinkle caster sugar over the top of the cookies.
- Stack cookies in columns and leave to cool. The column is important because of the amount of butter in the dough!
- Enjoy with a cup of tea or on their own!
Notes
As cookies cool, they typically leach out a little bit of butter. By stacking your cakes/cookies to cool, the butter will be reabsorbed into the cookie below, making for a buttery-er more delicious cookie!
If you would like more or less Rose Water, you can substitute water and Rose Water evenly. 1/2 a teaspoon is enough to get a little bit of the flavor, but not enough to gross out the people who aren't into rose water! The original recipe called for 1 tsp of rose water, but we felt it was a little over powering.